Speculation fueled food price rise

Since the early 1980s, the UN hypothesized a simple causal connection between environmental stress and violence. And since that time innumerable studies of history and current affairs show that this is not the case: food pricing and distribution has to do with market forces and not with the actual quantity of food.

The Star articles fail to mention that a suppressed World Bank report attributed the 2008 rise in food prices to the diversion of agricultural production to biofuels; another unmentioned cause for the steep price increase was the opening of wheat production to financial speculation and futures trading on the stock market.

Under current free market arrangements, protective measures are not allowable, so Russia’s protective restrictions on exporting wheat was interpreted by John Kirton, co-director of the G20 Research Group at the Munk centre, as hoarding food; in fact Russia had lost 40 per cent of its wheat product in 2008 and needed to feed its own people.

A very concerning aspect of linking environmental catastrophes to violence is that this leads to defining “security” as a military problem and it neglects the real causes of food shortages and of climate change itself: the unrestricted practices of the exorbitantly rich sectors of the economy.